清 鄭燮 蘭竹圖 卷|Orchids and bamboo by Zheng Xie

Zheng Xie's "Orchids and Bamboo" from 1742 is a handscroll that functions as a coded letter of moral resistance, housed today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artist was a county magistrate in the Qing Dynasty, and he painted this while still serving in office, using ink on paper as his sole medium.

Look at how the calligraphy and the plants are rendered with the same brushstroke. The orchid, a flower that releases its scent in hidden valleys where no one observes it, stands for the secluded virtue of a scholar who does right without an audience. The bamboo beside it bends under pressure but will not break; the feathered tips of the leaves show where his dry brush ran out of ink mid-stroke, a signature of the literati tradition's material honesty.

In 1740, Zheng Xie was so moved by the suffering of famine victims during his tenure as magistrate that he drew a painting of bamboo and inscribed it with a lament that the rustling leaves sounded like the cries of the people. His refusal to ingratiate himself with corrupt superiors led him to resign from office entirely, retreating into a life of art where his brushstrokes became his most direct and uncompromised voice.

An orchid, a stalk of bamboo, a poem, and a red seal: that is the whole vocabulary here. What do you think this scroll would have said to a fellow scholar-official who unrolled it two hundred and seventy years ago?